Short-Sighted Ignorance

A fellow user by the name of Travis Touchdown on VG Facts recently brought to my attention and others this fan comic.

Stay classy, Samus.

Besides the not-so-obvious fact this is a Metroid comic strip, that is Samus with a punchline that makes absolutely no sense, but the comment she makes Samus say at the end is actually hilarious, in a “god you are a dumb ass.”

The two images (which the artist redrew in their own style) of Zelda from Breath Of The Wild are somehow evidence Zelda is somehow another crying princess that has to be rescued. I don’t know how many of our readers have played through Breath Of The Wild yet, so major spoiler warnings after this paragraph, because I have to break down why this webcomic author is a fucking moron.

Once you unlock the camera rune for your Shiekah Slate, twelve pictures show up in the album. These pictures cannot be deleted, and according to the story are pictures Zelda took herself. These pictures serve the purpose of detailing the story of Link being Zelda’s appointed knight one hundred years before Calamity Ganon destroyed Hyrule and turned it into the in-game world you explore. Because Link in present time is suffering from amnesia, he doesn’t know who he really is in-game.

Hence where the memories come in.

Scattered throughout the game map are glowing points, which if you find them, Link will suddenly remember a memory based on the environment that matches the picture in Zelda’s album. These memories can be found in any order, but they actually have a set sequence and show off how Zelda and Link’s relationship developed in the past. Over the course of reliving Link’s past with Zelda, we learn the following:

Zelda is at first jealous and bitter of Link due to Link reminding her constantly of her own failures, something Gerudo Champion Urbosa makes mention of twice in the memory cutscenes.

Over the course of the memories we see her start to warm up to Link and in only one memory Link rescues her from the Yiga.

She is constantly trying and failing to harness the ancient power sleeping within her due to her being a descendant of a princess with a golden power.

The scene of her crying has nothing to do with her being kidnapped. Calamity Ganon launched a surprise attack that caught everyone off guard, cursing the Guardian robots and Divine Beasts, killing the Champions, destroying Hyrule and killing her father. This makes her feel like an absolute failure, as she feels directly responsible for failing to prevent the Calamity from reviving.

She literally self-sacrifices herself to keep Calamity Ganon at bay for over a century. While your objective is to rescue her, she is actually keeping Ganon at bay while you are farting around Hyrule.

I know it sucks Metroid seems to becoming a less important Nintendo franchise to Nintendo, but in all honesty there is nobody to blame but the fans. Besides losing their absolute shit over Other M and not letting it go even now, their reception to Federation Force which included a cancellation petition and harassing Next Level Games, to propping up a fucking fan game remake that took a decade to make, it feels like Karma. And as well know, Karma can be an absolute bitch.

It says something when Fire Emblem, a Nintendo series which was planned to be put on ice if Awakening didn’t do well, is now a more recognized franchise (despite the cries of censorship) with the upcoming remake of the second Famicom game, Fire Emblem Warriors and a newly announced Switch title. So really Metroid fans, you need to stop being so terrible and short-sighted, because Nintendo knows you exist and is now leery of touching Metroid.

This is what entitlement causes. The Metroid fans have become so grating that Nintendo is starting to sour on Metroid. I do think they’re working on a new one, but these things take time and Metroid is series that requires a lot of attention. So in the meantime they give us little side games to keep the franchise in your mind. The fans shit themselves because it’s not Prime 4 and Nintendo sours on it a little more.

How long did we have to wait for a new Donkey Kong game before Returns on Wii? How long for Star Fox? While I love those franchises, you have to realize that at some point the creators hit a kind of dry spell with them and need time to replenish their creative juices. I think it’s better to wait than for them to force out uninspired games that tarnish the franchise.

And I’m really sick of people jumping to the “Oh look, Nintendo is using the damsel in distress trope again” bandwagon. It betrays a superficial knowledge of the franchises in question. If you’re talking about Princess Peach, yeah, she’s that stereotype. But Zelda? Samus? Hell no. Zelda hasn’t been a damsel in distress since Wind Waker iirc and Samus is a planet destroying, species genociding, galactic bounty hunter. Not counting Other M, when has she ever been a damsel in distress?

People are so married to the narratives they have in their heads they make themselves look stupid with the fallacious arguments they make.

The only thing funnier than a bitter fanbase is random gamers who think they know the inner workings of Nintendo. That aside:

“…but in all honesty there is nobody to blame but the fans. Besides losing their absolute shit over Other M and not letting it go even now…”

and then the very next paragraph:

“…Fire Emblem, a Nintendo series which was planned to be put on ice if Awakening didn’t do well…”

Oh. So was it that Fire Emblem fans came together in perfect harmony and supported Awakening in order to save the franchise even though it was a radical departure from the formula of successful past Fire Emblem games and they didn’t actually like it? Because that’s what you’re blaming the Metroid fans for not doing.

I am glad that an article like this has been written. For too long, all I have seen of the Metroid fanbase is that it has slipped into the realm of toxicity and cancer that you would normally find in the Sonic, or even the Undertale fandom. The overreaction that Federation Force got was enough for me to disavow myself from that fandom. It’s about damn time that voices like Matto’s are speaking out against the stupidity found in that fandom.

Don’t get me started on the amount of backlash Metroid: Other M got where it is perceived by its critics as a “sexist game that ruined everything Samus is” with overwritten articles like Metroid: Other M- The Elephant in the Room (an article that cherry picks its evidence so much to present the game’s storyline with unfortunate implications of abuse and misogyny) or TVTrope’s “Mother May I See Metroid: Other M” (a slanted blog that attempts to discredit counterarguments offered in defense of Metroid: Other M by way of strawman and hit and run fallacies) and the whole cacophony of hatred that you can find on YouTube. I know that I sound contrarian, and feel free to disagree with me, but since that game’s release the fanbase has only gotten worse as time has gone on. Federation Force was just a whole new level of stupidity for the fandom, and I think that horse’s corpse should remained untouched.

I have faith that Nintendo is coming out with more Metroid games, negative fan reaction be damned. Much like how Fire Emblem found international success with Awakening, I have good hope that a Prime 4 and perhaps another mainline Metroid title will be revealed after skipping the Wii U (Not counting Nintendo Land’s Metroid Blast minigame).

Well that article didn’t age too well. What do you know, not supporting bad games didn’t kill the franchise after all. It’s almost like Nintendo used the criticism of the “terrible” fan base to make a better product.

Hope you learned a lesson about how consumer-producer relationships work.

“What do you know, not supporting bad games didn’t kill the franchise after all.” – Federation Force was Nintendo attempting to keep Metroid alive. The complaints were from a small, vocal minority of gamers who were telling Nintendo that if they couldn’t have Metroid EXACTLY how they wanted it, no matter if it’s financially sound
or even feasible, then they don’t want it and no one else should get it either. And they better be careful because one day they might just get exactly what they’re asking for: Nothing.

“It’s almost like Nintendo used the criticism of the “terrible” fan base” – Well, the fanbase is terrible and they have done a terrible job trying to convince Nintendo that they are willing to buy Metroid games in large enough numbers to make continued production possible. We wouldn’t be having this discussion if Metroid sold better. Metroid already isn’t popular. It’s why there wasn’t a Metroid game on Wii U. It would be too expensive to make to the demanding specifications of modern gamers. The smear campaign over the game from it’s first reveal has been absolutely disgusting. Why would anyone want to pander to a fanbase that is so petty and childish? And besides, most of these people were never going to play FF, or the recently revealed Metroid II remake and Prime 4 anyway. A lot of the backlash came from people who look for any and every little thing to attack Nintendo for.

“Hope you learned a lesson about how consumer-producer relationships work.” – From this sentence, I believe that you’re one of those people who believes that a company should give customers what they want. You don’t give customers what they want. That is the one thing a company should NEVER do. That’s focus group talk. You can’t go by what customers say they want. A company should give customers what they NEED. Look at the Wii. The media kept saying that it was going to be a failure, that motion controls would never catch on, that it would get smothered by the PS3 and 360, and that it would be Nintendo’s last console. When it came out, it became an instant hit and sold over 100 million units. You don’t get those results from “giving customers what they want.” Customers don’t know what they want until you deliver it. You have to give them what they need, not what they want.

Alex9234, thank you so much for rebutting the hell out of the OP’s comment. The level of arrogance that Metroid fans like OP have is just unbelievable. He demonstrates the ignorance that Matto was just talking about. You said it much better than I would have.